


You'll Never Look Back for Me

by orphan_account



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Blood and Injury, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-02
Updated: 2019-09-02
Packaged: 2020-10-05 02:27:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20481341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: The moment, too, sinks away, and Adora can’t help wondering in the slowly growing spaces of sanity that line her path back to herself, whether Catra ever really intended to lead her to an explanation. Probably not.She exhales the thought like a sickness.





	You'll Never Look Back for Me

These days, Adora seems to sleep restlessly at best. Stray breezes, stray shadows, stray anything-at-alls from everywhere else on the Bright Moon grounds shock her to consciousness faster than a pin to the floor, and it’s all she can do not to break a window every time it happens and ruin the night for everyone else.

It’s something of a blessing that the guards allow her the space for nightly walks.

It’s slightly more of a blessing that the guards have very recently given up following her.

Stalking off to some quiet corner of the Whispering Woods to sulk herself closer to drowsiness under the songs of the night — gusts of wind dancing unhurried over water as the trees sway, and groan, and creak, and moan their mysterious, wordless schemes into the still left behind — never really holds quite the same appeal with an honor guard hiding just out of sight.

Tonight, she’s alone. Tonight, she’s lying on the shore of a pond — some small, untouched thing in the center of a clearing — arms folded behind her head like a pillow and legs folded over each other like something distinctly less, watching each of the Etherian moons float through the sky as if staring long enough might be all it takes reveal their secrets.

It isn’t. Obviously.

Just like, tonight, she isn’t _really_ alone. But, then, maybe that detail is one of the secrets. Maybe being able to hear silent footsteps is a gift. Maybe the moons listened after all.

A body drops to the ground with a pained, exhausted groan, hovering barely an inch away before their whole presence shifts, and relaxes, and their back is pressed to Adora’s waist like they never considered sitting anywhere else. Adora doesn’t move until she hears grunting, until she hears hissing, wincing, gasping, air pushing out through too-clenched teeth, a too-tight jaw, too-tense everything there could possibly be. Adora doesn’t speak until the noises part long enough to reveal the almost nauseatingly rhythmic scrape of claws through broken skin, claws through muscle, claws on bone.

“What’re you doing here, Catra?” She asks quietly, angles her head just far enough to catch the very farthest edge of Catra’s gaze as she continues her work on her shoulder.

Something loosens when she asks. Something that was knotted tight, so high in her chest it may as well have been lodged in her throat ever since she left the Horde. It loosens, and loosens, and loosens until it isn’t together at all, and Adora is left with a comfortable void in her chest and a gasp on the tip of her tongue when she sees Catra bent over herself, blood practically glowing under the moonlight where it’s smeared along her fingers and the back of her palm. Down the lines of the muscle on her arm until it splatters into the grass and seeps into the fabric of Adora’s undershirt.

Catra glares without looking, bites out a simple, sarcastic, “_Digging for buried treasure,_” bloodied hands visibly trembling hard enough to be useless as she finally, finally, finally pulls a jagged piece of metal from the wound at her shoulder.

She’s topless. Like it makes the slightest difference. Like her top isn’t covered in almost as much blood as the rest of her, piled alongside her belts and some tools in the distance. Adora still watches like it does; still watches the way her ribs expand and contract with relief, the way the muscles in her jaw and the expression on her face drop and relax when the metal falls to the grass with a dull, heavy thud.

Stray droplets of red seep into the roots below. “I could’ve done that for you,” Adora exhales. _I’ve done more._

“Oh, but you hate it so _much_ when I’m forward,” Catra answers. _I know you have, _sits unspoken in the gaps between her words, _and I don’t care._ “What about you? What are you doing here?”

Adora isn’t quite sure how to respond. They’re enemies, still enemies, always enemies, even what seems like lifetimes later, and that feeling solidifies just a little bit more with every new night like this. Every new meeting in the dark that refuses to sit still long enough to be defined. They’re enemies. What they’re about to do here won’t change that for a second.

But. _But._

“I asked first,” Adora whispers, gentle, hesitant, teasing. She climbs her way up to sitting — to Catra’s shoulder pressed soft to the dip of her undershirt’s collar — and she brings one hand to the makeshift first-aid kit split across the pockets lining her legs like it might ever be enough to demonstrate that she means it.

All any of it earns her is a frustrated huff of hot air.

“Catra,” she tries again, leans closer, closer, and closer until Catra’s hurt shoulder is pressed hard against her, until her each and every breath is bouncing off the skin of Catra’s throat and sliding down, down, down and into the dark.

“_Adora,_” Catra sneers. Her eyes stay trained on the distance. On everything, anything, away from her.

Adora bites back a smile. She lets their silent standoff continue for seconds, and minutes, and longer than that, lets the sound of their breathing run out of sync and back again, over, and over, and over, until she finally gives in with a short, shallow laugh.

Catra is here. She’s here. That’s enough to know that she isn’t saying no, and for now — for right now — that’s enough. Adora lets her smile free, buries it into the still unblemished skin at the junction of Catra’s shoulder and collarbones. “At least let me patch you up,” she says. It’s more of a question than not.

Catra doesn’t argue. She barely even moves.

So, Adora does.

“Does this hurt?” she asks, pulling back and intently watching Catra’s face as her hand lifts to trace the injury, fingers sliding, prodding, poking around tender, broken skin. Catra gasps, a choked, empty noise, flinching slightly, jaw tensing, goosebumps racing away from Adora’s touch and down, down, down her arm. Adora knows it hurts. Just like she knows that when Catra tries for a smile, something smug, and confident — something totally out of place with the her stuck wincing and struggling to keep from biting her own tongue — it’s less to do with the pain than it is the loss of control.

“Looks worse than it is,” Catra offers. She would never give up so easily. “It always does.”

And maybe that’s true. Maybe it is. But it isn’t where Adora’s thoughts settle. She’s already moved on, already busy thinking about Catra not being so lucky. Catra being hurt even worse. Catra taking a gunshot, or a piece of shrapnel, or some ridiculous magic spell somewhere else. Catra dying far away and leaving Adora alone because she never considered that _worse _might already be here.

Adora has already moved on and into the distance, and she doesn’t like that, doesn’t _want_ that. Doesn’t want this emotion shaped like sadness but worse; deeper, uglier, harsher, and sharper. Twisting itself closer and closer to the center of her heart like some ridiculous sympathetic companion to all of Catra’s pain. It feels bitter, tastes bitter. Bile, and acid, and a too-deep frown digging wrinkles into her face decades too soon. She digs her fingertips into the shredded edges of Catra’s injury just to escape it. Just to hear Catra choke again. Just to hear proof of her life.

“_Oh,_” Adora coos before she can stop herself. She leans back in and meets the corner of Catra’s gaze as her mismatched eyes fall dark and heavy with frustrated, impotent rage. “You’re so _sensitive _tonight.”

“Fuck off,” Catra bites between presses of fingers and empty, wordless gasps. She brings their mouths crashing together before Adora can find the chance to express her relief.

It’s easy, this. It’s easy, when she’s in this state of mind — sleepless night after night after night spent escaping the castle and watching the moons in the dark, praying to each for rest like they might ever listen — to focus on making Catra _feel_. Even if it is only pain. It settles her. Calms her. Soothes her. To be able to make Catra feel in ways nearly lost to the past, now hidden underneath secret meetings in the dark spent licking collective wounds. As pathetically little as that is. As pathetically little as that counts. Adora has always struggled on difficult nights after difficult days. Self-care wasn’t exactly something taught in the Horde, and it has never come easy — for either of them — but shedding the rules of their lives and giving up to everything but _feeling_ with Catra is different. Effortless. It always was.

It, maybe, always will be.

So, she lets herself feel. Everything. And soon she’s reaching for the makeshift first aid kit like each piece is a fragment of a memory she refuses to let go. Catra’s bloody fingertips grip tight, and hard, and soft, and tense, smudging dark marks into the fabric at her thigh when Adora’s touch finally fades from the wound.

“Here, this is going to sting,” Adora exhales, pulling out a small, steel bottle of water. She unscrews the cap, angles it forward and close enough to mist the skin on Catra’s shoulder, and it maybe, maybe, _maybe_ pulls a smirk over the line of Catra’s mouth when she presses it insistently above the spot.

“Well,” Catra chuckles in answer, tone playful and her eyes sliding shut with a sigh in a way Adora has only ever known to follow a sense of total relaxation, of resignation and surrender. “Who am I to refuse an offer like that?”

She falls silent as Adora works, as she wets, and stitches, and dresses the wound. Her head lolls back and she groans from somewhere deep in her throat, already settling somewhere familiar. Somewhere safe. Flickers of smiles with eyes fluttering open and closed. Teeth worrying deeper and deeper at her bottom lip every time Adora’s touch drifts just slightly too close to that shredded patch of flesh. Catra’s breathing is perfectly calm through it all, perfectly low and steady. Slow, when Adora smooths the last piece of tape over her skin.

And they pause, there.

They steal a moment away from the dark. No words. No eye contact. Just the constant of gentle touch and the mutual warmth of exhaustion and trust.

“Done already?” Catra asks, seconds or minutes later, after the moons have moved across the sky and the dark and the light have tilted just so.

“Hm?” Adora hums. She leans away, examines Catra’s shoulder once more. Her fingers brush over the shape of the jagged scar beneath the dressings, and, “Oh — oh. Yeah.”

“Too bad” Catra practically purrs, reaches up with her injured arm and drags a single claw slow as a whisper along the path of Adora’s jaw. “I love it when you play doctor.”

This, too, is easy. The simply existing. The feeling every corner of every emotion is one thing, but this is another; overt flirting like no one ever means it and like nothing ever changed but the end goal of it all. Like they’re not both more and more useless with every new day spent apart. This, Adora can handle. Even if the rough, graveled edge to Catra’s voice always seems to send her stomach flipping itself against the base of her ribs.

Even then.

It is, truly, always easy — so, so, easy — for Adora to let herself need Catra like this. To let Catra need her. It is, maybe, why Adora has always been so terrible at saying no. It’s maybe why she’s spent her time away from Catra loving everyone else just a bit too easily. Why she’s always so eager to help, always so eager to have what’s needed, to solve every mystery, to find every answer. And, sometimes, sometimes, much more often in these days spent filling the Catra shaped hole in her heart with misshapen brightness and light, there’s nothing to find because the something they need is her.

Even if it isn’t _Catra _wanting her. Even if it isn’t Catra needing her. It’s close enough, and close enough is good enough when they’re both busy forgetting how to need in ways other than this.

The shape of letting others need is almost the same if she squints and ignores the hurt of filling that space with something that doesn’t quite fit, because the thing _she_ needs is to see it full by any means necessary. What she’s found in the light is almost there. It’s almost enough.

Almost.

So. When that finger tracing her jaw moves down, and down, and down until it’s prodding at her chest and pushing her back, Adora doesn’t fight. She lets Catra in. Lets Catra ease her back and onto the grass, lets her crawl into her lap and ease her fingers past the hem of her undershirt. Pull the entire thing off in one smooth, practiced motion. Adora goes along with it all, because she is just so, so bad at telling Catra no. Because Catra is everything she needs.

Adora reaches slowly up, traces the shape of the bandages on Catra’s shoulder, one arm still splayed out in the grass above her head while Catra uses her lap like a throne. Towering, smirking, so clearly smug and satisfied with every inch of Adora’s passivity.

“You get hurt a lot,” Adora says, only half paying attention to the feeling of claws dragging gently over her stomach, pulling chills along by a leash in their path.

Catra snorts at that, reaches around, and plucks a gasp straight out of Adora’s throat. She arches closer and closer until Catra can trace at the scars along her side. Along her back, and her spine, and her hips, and everywhere, everywhere, truly every last inch of Adora’s exposed body, and, she whispers, “Look who’s talking, princess.”

The nickname deserves a laugh, a slap, some sort of answer as long as it’s _something,_ only, it’s a little hard to care when Catra is grinding her weight slow and lazy into the shape of her thighs.

It’s a little hard to feel anything the line might have earned when Catra’s hands are making a show of sliding up her own body and clasping onto Adora’s wrist. Dragging it lower, and lower, and lower, until it’s settled past Catra’s leggings, between her legs, palm up, and fingers slack, and _oh_, it is just so hard to care about the nickname when Catra is like this for her. Hips rocking one way, rolling another. And Adora knows, she _knows _that she’s already miles down the road to a hand cramp with the way her arm is bent and angled to make this work, but Catra is still gripping tight at her wrist, rasping and moaning into the calm of the night, and it is still — still — so hard to care.

Adora watches as the strain of the movement causes blood to bloom from the bandage at Catra’s shoulder, bright and too vivid in the faint glow of moonlight. It oozes slow, steady through each individual layer, and Adora uses her free hand to launch herself up, launch herself forward, and dig her teeth hard into the closest corner of her handiwork.

Catra groans, too loud, too hurt, too angry, and it is everything Adora hoped for when the only place that noise leads them is one of Catra’s hands fisted into the hair at the back of her head hard enough to draw tears. Hard enough that Adora can feel individual strands starting to give and to break.

She bites harder.

And it earns her everything left to count as anything; Catra abandons her hair entirely to press closer and closer, to claw at Adora’s back hard enough to make her bleed, hard enough to navigate the spaces between old, worn down scars until every gap and every bare patch of skin is hurt, and broken, and stained in more proof of their need.

Their bodies are too close, and too unaligned, and Adora can barely still feel anything past her elbow, but Catra keeps grinding forward, and forward, and harder, and harder, and with the way their bodies are just barely slotted together, it feels like Catra is fucking her with her very own hand. It feels like emotions wrapped up in so much tape and so much gauze that Adora can barely still recognize the shape of them, barely still feel the weight of them, but she tries. She tries.

She tries, just like she throws her head into the crook of Catra’s neck. Just like she brings her free hand to the hard ridge of Catra’s hips. And they’re maybe both breathing too hard, moaning too much, turning the silence of the night into something distinctly not, but they go, and they go, and they go, unhindered by guilt, or by pride, or by even that emotion still too wrapped up to name. Until Catra’s muscles visibly flex under Adora’s grip. Until she’s arching away from the dark and into Adora’s chest like she thinks she can sink straight inside.

Something pops in Adora’s arm, crushed as it is, and white-hot hurt flares out, but she doesn’t care. She doesn’t stop for even the pain. Not when Catra is moving like she’s seconds from bursting, seconds from breaking, seconds from finding some way to really, truly, fall into Adora’s whole presence.

“_Fuck,_” Catra hisses, barely still there but for her eyes kept wide open, kept locked on Adora’s like there isn’t anything else in the world. Her muscles go slack and her orgasm sends her tumbling forward, sends them both tumbling back into the soft, gentle embrace of the dirt and the grass. “Look at me,” she croaks, struggling to stay focused. But she does. She does. “I want to see — look at me.”

“Catra.” Her name practically leaps from Adora’s tongue, but Catra shakes her head in something doubtlessly meant to be frustration, leans forward and kisses her, bites Adora’s bottom lip hard enough to bruise before touching their foreheads together and grasping either side of her face. Breathless, boneless, and still, still, fighting to keep control.

“_No._ Just, let me — keep — keep looking at me.”

Adora keeps looking.

Adora doesn’t call her name again.

She shoves the urge away, and replaces it with laser focus on each of Catra’s noises, reactions, and movements. The easy, weightless way she moves, the faint flicker behind her eyes becoming suddenly more, and even the ragged quality to every half-vocalized word left in the shape of the noises she makes. Adora watches like she might be able to wrap them up in cloth and tuck them safely away somewhere between the sutures, and sprays, and dressings in her pockets. Like she might be able to keep them there until time has softened the edges and stripped away the near countless layers of hurt to reveal the something worthwhile, something beautiful, something _worth it_ buried there in the center.

She doesn’t get the chance. Because before she can change their positions, or take control, or take for herself, Catra’s hands are at her arm. One wrapped just above her elbow and one at her wrist, and before she can stop it, Catra _pulls_, and all Adora feels is her vision whiting out; is wet and rough, parts scraping together than never should.

When Adora’s sight returns, Catra’s hands are at the waistband of her pants. She’s sliding down, sliding away, until Adora’s legs are wide open and Catra is resting her head against the inside of one thigh, running her breath and her claws through some aimless routine in time with the throb in her elbow. Through some unknowable shape around the nothing and everything bare inches away from the place Adora wants those fingers most.

“What’s living in Bright Moon like?” Catra asks suddenly, softly, already back to some distant version of herself like she’s not busy tracing a path toward Adora’s wetness, and oh, Adora hates this. She hates it because Catra is talking to her like a stranger, already finding her way back to their daily routine: insults, and jokes, and pretending like they don’t know each other anywhere near as well as they do. It’s in her voice. In her movements. In the way she’s already back to refusing eye contact like she isn’t still climbing down from the heights she found less than seconds ago.

Adora doesn’t need more hands on her sanity than the none of the moment to understand that hate.

And, oh, oh, _oh,_ Adora thinks, this is why Catra wanted no names. This is a moment, a Capital M Moment, and Adora missed that detail just long enough to lose her chance at learning the meaning. She spent so long so focused on feeling that she missed it completely. Spent so long focused on falling into tonight like she falls into always — diving in headfirst without so much as an instant paused to take in her surroundings until she’s three, four, five steps past the finish line — that she never took notice of the rest.

Blindsides the shape of Catra blocking out anything else but forward.

One of these days, there won’t be anything left but to break.

“I don’t — ” she gasps, eyes falling shut in almost that moment because Catra has decided she’s finally done teasing before even hearing her answer, fingers slipping exactly where Adora had hoped, wanted, _needed,_ and all she can see anymore is everything.

“Like,” Catra starts again, lazy as ever, her head still nestled against Adora’s thigh. She’s watching her fingers move like nothing in the world matters more than watching herself. Adora wants to go back to the hurt, to go back to the fun, and the feeling without _feeling,_ and the anything else other than this. Anything else but Catra talking to her like this isn’t right now, and like she isn’t seconds away from sliding a third finger inside and deliberately, deliberately, _always _deliberately ignoring her clit until the last possible second; until Adora is a stone’s throw from crazy. “What do you princesses even _do_ with your time?”

“_Catra,_” Adora moans, shallow, nearly empty, and saying her name again or at all is definitely breaking the rules of the game, but she moves before Catra can remind her. She reaches down with one hand and digs hard into Catra’s scalp. She pulls. Closer, and closer, and closer, until a burst of hot air that feels suspiciously like a laugh brushes against her, and Catra takes her slowly — finally — into her mouth.

Adora grips tighter. Catra looks up, finally meets her gaze, and Adora misses it completely because in the split-second flash of recognition, her senses fill with the rough, and warm, and wet of Catra’s tongue, and her vision becomes nothing but electricity. It courses through her body until it’s everywhere, everywhere, choking whatever might still remain into nothing.

And when she settles back into herself, Adora sees Catra staring, Catra watching, Catra waiting for the moment Adora is capable of listening.

She whispers, “You’re always so wet for me, Adora,” like it’s the most flattering thing in the world.

Adora gasps hard enough to gag. Catra hums through a smirk. Lowers herself back down. And Adora comes. Almost embarrassingly intense if not for the fact that _Catra_ is the one doing this to her. If not for the fact that no one else makes her feel like Catra.

She comes. The very instant Catra’s mouth sets back to work. Jaw clenched, muscles straining, veins filled with nothing but searing hot fire, and oh, oh, _oh, _she wants to arch further into Catra’s arms but her grip is like iron on her hips, and she’s pinned down with too much force to fight until the instinct dissolves into squirming and writhing. Dies before it gets a chance to live.

The moment, too, sinks away, and Adora can’t help wondering in the slowly growing spaces of sanity that line her path back to herself, whether Catra ever really intended to lead her to an explanation. Probably not.

She exhales the thought like a sickness.

And again, Catra smiles. Catra smirks, pulls her hand free and drags herself up to her knees, licking across her fingers only once she finally has Adora’s full attention.

She tilts her head. Admiring her work, Adora thinks.

“One of these days,” Catra says, smirk growing just that much wider. “I’m going to ruin you.”

Adora isn’t sure how to explain that she already has. But, then, Catra seems to understand anyway. Maybe she just wants to hear her say it. Like always. _I'm already yours, idiot._ Wouldn't that be fitting.

Adora can't find the words, and Catra, the living embodiment of _maybe, maybe, maybe_, is already moving back to her feet and gathering her things, halfway through singsonging her usual, effortless, “See you around, Adora.”

It sounds somehow softer. Not quite harsh enough to be harsh. Terrible edges sanded down from_ jagged_ to _sharp_, the bite in the name long lost in the mess of whatever this was. Adora can't place why it matters. It does, though. She knows it does. She feels it in the shapes and the sounds of Catra's laughter, quiet, almost gentle as it disappears into echoes and whispers, bouncing lazy off the shape of each and every tree.


End file.
